Subject: France First! Election Gives Voice To Far-Right Party
Date: Published: 3/23/92 (203 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    France First!
    Election Gives Voice
    To Far-Right Party
    ---
    The National Front Seeks
    A Purer `French Identity'
    By Expelling Immigrants
    ----
    By Peter Gumbel
    Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

    MARSEILLE, France -- The powerful showing of an
 ultra-right party in French elections yesterday has left
 outsiders struggling for explanations.  How could Jean-Marie
 Le Pen's National Front, the xenophobic party that wants to
 throw foreign workers out of France, nearly outpoll the
 Socialist Party of France's president, Francois Mitterrand?  
    Has Mr. Le Pen's party changed, or have the French
 themselves?  
    Maybe it's a little of both.  Call it the Megret effect.
    Bruno Megret is the chief strategist and No. 2 man in the
 National Front, which years ago bumped along with less than
 1% of the French vote.  Now polls show that one-third of the
 French agree with some of the party's ideas.  In regional
 elections yesterday, the Front won 14% of votes nationwide
 and well over 20% in some places, compared with just over 9%
 in the 1986 regional elections.  The socialists, by contrast,
 saw their showing plunge from 30% in 1986 to about 19%
 yesterday.  They were outpolled outright by the Front in areas
 that included Paris.
    Such showings could propel the Front into several regional
 governments as coalition partners of conservative parties,
 which did best in yesterday's election but also saw their
 share of the vote drop.  And it could help the Front in next
 year's national elections for parliament.
    "The stronger we are, the more we'll be respected," says
 Mr. Megret.
    Mr. Megret has played a key role in broadening the Front's
 appeal, and he has done so by projecting two distinct faces.
 One of those is of the unassuming, babyfaced party technocrat
 who discusses the Front's investment policies with business
 executives.  "I am a serious, responsible person," Mr. Megret
 says softly.
    The second is that of the man who strides aggressively
 into halls crowded with sympathizers to bark out the Front's
 doctrine of racial venom.  He speaks of a world-wide
 "cosmopolitan" conspiracy that seeks to abolish national
 identity and infect the world with the AIDS virus.  He says
 racial integration has corrupted the U. S. and he mocks those
 in French politics with Jewish-sounding names.
    Then, as spotlights glare, he demands that France halt the
 construction of all mosques in the country, that foreigners
 be forced to take medical tests before entering France, and
 that boats be chartered to carry immigrants in the country
 away.  Each proposal wins thunderous applause.
    "Who took jobs from the French?"  he shouts.  "An invasion
 of foreigners."  The Front is the only party "with the courage
 to do what needs to be done."
    Less known and less flamboyant than Mr. Le Pen, Mr. Megret
 is viewed by detractors as one of the most dangerous men in
 French politics.  The reason:  He is a master at concealing his
 extremism behind a facade of respectability -- and he has
 remade the National Front with a similar double-identity.  "He
 has a touch of Goebbels," charges Alain Rollat, a political
 correspondent for Le Monde.
    In particular, he has sought to couch the party's harsh
 nationalism in a populist plan of action.  Outside the
 gatherings of his supporters, talk of social issues largely
 supplants racist jibes.  His core message is consistent,
 however:  There is a cause-and-effect link, he says, between
 the nation's estimated four million immigrants and its rising
 rate of unemployment, which stands at about 10%, or three
 million people.
    For all of its success in yesterday's elections, the Front
 hasn't completely burnished its image.  Opinion surveys show
 that 65% of French people still see it as a threat to
 democracy.  Still, the party is now largely setting the
 political agenda in France.  It has forced all the established
 parties to confront the divisive issue of immigration, a
 topic other European nations are wrestling with too.  And it
 has set all sides buzzing with talk of "national values" and
 other Front phrases.
    "Over the past three years we have won a big ideological
 victory.  We have managed to impose our vocabulary," says
 Damien Bariller, an aide to Mr. Megret.  Guy Birenbaum, a
 political scientist who has written a critical study of the
 party, concurs:  "The only thing people are talking about is
 the National Front.  It's exactly what Megret wanted."
    A day spent with Mr. Megret just before the voting shows
 how the 20-year-old Front is feeding on French malaise.
    One morning in Marseille, Mr. Megret gets off the early
 plane from Paris, dressed in a dapper tweed jacket, blue
 shirt and striped tie.  First stop is a 90-acre apple farm in
 Cavaillon belonging to Lucien Gros.  A portly farmer with
 white hair, Mr. Gros greets him warmly at the gate, which is
 festooned with a National Front poster declaring, "They
 prefer foreigners, we defend the French."
    Mr. Gros has been an ardent Front activist since the early
 1980s, when labor unions picketed his farm.  They said he was
 forcing his apple pickers, who came from Morocco, to live in
 poor conditions, sometimes without pay.  The Front jumped on
 the issue, organizing a pro-Gros demonstration and
 instructing its lawyers to challenge labor's protest in
 court.
    Mr. Megret climbs on some upturned crates to give his two
 dozen listeners a brief pep talk.  What Mr. Gros lived
 through, he declares, "shows what the National Front can do
 for people who are victims of immigration."
    Back in his chauffeur-driven car, Mr. Megret denies his
 critics' charge of fascism.  The Front, he suggests, has
 simply inherited the values of Gaullism.
    But the values Mr. Megret talks of are more akin to the
 paranoia of white supremacism than to the patriotism of
 Charles De Gaulle.  The Front's Mr. Le Pen caused a furor in
 1987 when, appearing in a TV interview, he dismissed the Nazi
 Holocaust as "a detail of history."  Several publications
 associated with the Front regularly rail abusively at Jews as
 well as at Arabs and other foreigners:  A recent issue of a
 newsletter Mr. Megret helps put out talks of "an
 international Jewish masonic" lobby that supposedly has
 infiltrated France and is manipulating public opinion against
 the Front.
    Then there's his theory of cosmopolitanism.  "America has a
 big problem with cosmopolitanism, with the melting pot," he
 contends.  People of European origin could live together in
 harmony, he says.  "But with Hispanics, blacks and Asians, I
 expect a grave crisis."
    His view of America is partly personal.  After graduating
 from France's top school for engineers, he spent a year at
 the University of California at Berkeley in 1975, studying
 for a master's degree in science.  He says he was surprised to
 find that Americans are so tolerant.  But "a year there was
 enough."
    He later worked as a civil servant in the administration
 of President Valery Giscard d'Estaing and ran as a mainstream
 conservative candidate in the 1981 parliamentary elections.
 He lost.  In 1984, he joined the National Front.
    Mr. Megret's most recent role has been to elaborate on the
 Front's scorn for immigrants, especially Arabs from Northern
 Africa, by constructing its range of policy proposals that
 discriminate against foreigners living in France.  But at a
 lunchtime speaking engagement in the village of St. Remy de
 Provence, Mr. Megret deliberately avoids the issue.
    About 100 people have turned up to listen in a hall decked
 with posters warning that France "will be an Islamic republic
 in 20 years."  Mr. Megret focuses on the plight of French
 farmers, saying they have been driven "to the verge of
 bankruptcy by technocrats in Brussels working with the
 complicity of our politicians."
    Back in his car, Mr. Megret explains why he didn't mention
 immigrants.  "We are trying to show we are a party of
 government.  People know our position on immigration.  It's
 important to talk about other things," he says.
    Mr. Megret's lunchtime discourse has appealed strongly to
 Andre Melin, a well-educated computer engineer in his 50s.
 Like many recent converts to the Front, he seems typically
 middle class, and unlike the motley group of skinheads and
 neo-fascists the party initially attracted.  "Immigration is a
 problem in France, but it's only a secondary one."  he says.
 "The main problem is a loss of French identity."
    France's commitment to a united Europe, he frets, will
 just hand control over French affairs to bureaucrats in
 Brussels.  And he believes Arab immigrants are changing the
 nation's character.  The Front, Mr. Melin says, "is helping us
 rediscover our national and Christian roots."
    Similarly, the Fabres, a couple in their early 30s with
 five children, like what the Front says about preserving
 values such as family life.  "I know they sometimes say bad
 things, but I still want them to govern France," says Patrick
 Fabre, 34, who works in the military.  "Le Pen is cultured,
 intelligent and has good people around him.  Only the Front
 has the courage to say what is wrong with France."
    During the afternoon, Mr. Megret continues his moderate
 line, pitching the Front's social agenda to executives from a
 local construction company.  They seem impressed by his style,
 but not by his views on immigration.  The foreigners the Front
 wants to deport, they say, do unskilled labor many French
 won't touch, even if they're out of work.
    Back in the Marseille headquarters of the Front, Mr. 
 Megret polishes a speech before setting out for a rally of
 party activists in Aix-en-Provence.  He arrives at the rally
 at 9 p.m. and is whisked past a cordon of tough Front
 bodyguards wearing helmets and wielding truncheons.  The
 lights go down in the hall, and the 500-strong audience
 breaks into rhythmic clapping as Mr. Megret strides toward
 the rostrum, flashing a victory sign.  No longer does he need
 to watch his words.  He's among die-hard Front loyalists.
    He launches into an hour-long tirade against immigrants.
 Foreigners must be thrown out, he says.  And, to keep France
 racially pure, French women should stop working and have more
 children.  Finally, exhausted and bathed in sweat, he raises
 his voice in triumph.  "We are emerging as the movement that
 will govern France," he says, as the cheering crowd rises to
 sing the French national anthem.  "The National Front will
 prevail."

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